I've never heard someone claim apps are "the only" thing. As if a phone with apps but a broken keyboard or ugly design or no headphone jack would sell. Clearly a successful phone includes many variables like screen size, keyboard, form factor, wifi, software, etc and apps would be one factor in that consumer calculation. Seems like this is trying to rebut an argument no remotely thoughtful person has actually made.

As for the article the first half is basically complaining that the iphone catalog is unwieldy and hard to sift through. But the general tenor is that the person has more apps than he uses dialy. He says he uses 16 regularly. His friends have more apps than they use regularly. The salient point is they still use apps regularly. It surely isn't that they only use apps or never use apps. And really what people use daily is gonna vary from person to person. Also, the fact that a person doesn't use an app every day doesn't make the app not useful. I got a news app that i don't use daily but i have it for when i do want it. Like when i got time to kill. same with tons of other apps like angrybirds, etc. There are tons of apps i use but only sporatically like a flashlight app, package tracking apps, navigation, slingplayer, a jogging tracking app. I don't use soundcloud all the time but when i need it i want it. I rarely may make a phone call twice a month on my personal phone. But i'd never buy a phone calling app or without that functionality. So not using an app daily is not the measure of an apps worth. i got a banking app i use once a month.

For your first paragraph, just search through some of the previous discussions that talk about the elegance of the webOS interface. Someone almost always claims that apps are everything in those discussions.

For the rest of your statement, I think you are missing the point. One questions the need for hundreds of thousands of apps if you only download a hundred or so and use 20 or less. The goal for a new platform is not necessarily to match an existing platform app count to app count, it is to provide the few critical apps that consumers want/need while maintaining a steady (app) growth rate.

Also, some of the things you mentioned as apps were not really apps, but services. One would expect a cellphone to have the ability to make calls. The "flashlight" app is really just manipulates the flash service for your camera and that banking "app" is probably just a redirect to you bank's mobile website.

For me the bigger discussion is how poorly we leverage the internet right now. On the whole apps feel like a step backwards. For years developers felt they had to develop for Windows because it was the dominant platform. If you wanted to port your app to a Mac you had to invest a lot of time and money. Then along comes the internet and we finally have a platform that for the most part is OS independent. Rather than leverage that and make mobile sites that are truly platform independent we instead buy into apps and app ecosystems and again get caught in a meticulously laid out web setup by Apple/google et al to monetize what are essentially web apps in a fancy package that they can charge for. I can't blame them for wanting to make money but it is frustrating to see our society take a step back in time to a that era where it's once again all about what platform you're on.

I always use to look down at the app grazed smartphone user and involved myself in discussions with some of my friends that were like that. Yet, after moving to Windows and seeing the same app grazed crowd there complaining about missing apps, I realized, that sadly, any platform that wants to succeed needs them. Sad. But true.